Vinson reveals mobile TV solution at Mobile World Congress

Monday, February 25th, 2013

New startup Vinson breaks open mobile TV market with superior mobile OTT solution and a refreshing business model

Today the Dutch startup Vinson showcased their new white-label mobile OTT (Over The Top) TV solution for broadcasters, content aggregators and content distributors at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Their solution stands out from today’s existing ones as it is completely focused on swiping and comes with a disrupting business model that opens mobile TV to a whole new category of media companies. Vinson’s solution is free to use by broadcasters, content aggregators and content distributors.

The mobile TV business is experiencing a renewed interest due to the success of second screen applications and OTT solutions. Still there are huge barriers that prohibit the widespread adoption of mobile TV. Full blown mobile TV clients, developed for mostly distributors, are currently all custom projects involving heavy RFQ processes. These projects drive the costs to levels that make it very hard for many parties to still build an interesting business case. Next to these business challenges, the user interface developed for these clients come with a legacy. Many interfaces are developed before swiping became one of the main ways to interact with mobile apps. This creates clients with menu structures that are not very user friendly.

Vinson works on both these issues by offering a swipe optimized app together with a standardized cloud platform. The Vinson platform fits with broadcasters, content distributors and content aggregators that are looking for turnkey solutions but also for parties that have the expertise and infrastructure to do many functions themselves, like hosting of content. Vinson’s freemium pick and choose model eliminates the need for time consuming RFQ processes. It also creates the opportunity for broadcasters, content aggregators and distributors to develop and launch their own branded mobile TV client in little time against a very friendly budget.

Michael Plein, CEO at Vinson: “The reactions of both end users and industry have been overwhelming and motivated us. We created this platform as we were not satisfied with the current business environment and felt that the current mobile TV client simply not good enough. Mobile clients just didn’t work well and the were just not affordable for many broadcasters and distributors. Great to get this kind of feedback from the end-users and industry. We have built this solution from the ground up. We have an experienced team that is working on mobile video streaming for almost 10 years. We questioned everything of existing Mobile TV clients; Is this feature still needed? Is this the best way to do this with touchscreens? We worked for two years on this to make this the superior Mobile TV platform in the world. Now we are ready to bring this to our partners all over the globe.”

One of the latest customers that use the platform is a joint venture of Belgium broadcasters that developed a mobile TV solution for the Belgium market. With the name Stievie this solution was presented to the press last week and the first test users have already access to the product.

Wouter Mertens, New Media Architect at VMMa: “We just provided our brand assets and video content, and now have a technically outstanding app with a great design! Even with the amount of content and all of the interactive features, it remains performant, accessible and easy to use. It is a fantastic solution.”

Vinson has launched a showcase app that is available both on iPhone and iPad. Broadcasters, content aggregators and distributors can download the app and experience Vinson themselves.